Third Supreme Command

The Third Supreme Command was the third administration to oversee the Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL) supreme command of the Imperial German Army during World War I, headed by Chief of the General Staff Paul von Hindenburg and his deputy Erich Ludendorff. From August 1916, the German war effort came under the control of the Third Supreme Command; together, they began laying the foundations for a German-dominated Europe.

Background
Germany entered World War I without clear war aims, but its leaders were soon tempted by the idea of creating a German-dominated Europe. In September 1914, the German Chancellor drafted a plan for the annexation of Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern France and the economic exploitation of states in Central Europe. Though not officially adopted, this program represented government thinking. The battles of 1914-16 left Germany and Austria-Hungary in temporary control of parts of France, Belgium, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe.

History
Chief of the General Staff Paul von Hindenburg and Quartermaster-General Erich Ludendorff exercised joint power over Germany's Third Supreme Command (Hindenburg being the third German Chief of the General Staff to lead the war). They controlled German military strategy and also dictated economic and diplomatic policies. Kaiser Wilhelm II was barely consulted on policy, and the Chancellor, who headed the civilian government, depended on the approval of the Supreme Command. German military and business leaders worked closely together, pursuing the same nationalist and expansionist agenda.

The war machine
The policies of the Third Supreme Command grew partly out of an immediate need to cope with the war situation, including shortages of labor, raw materials, and food. To maximize war production, the Third Supreme Command sought the total state direction of the German economy, controlling the allocation of raw materials and taking powers to order workers into war industries. One of the ways in which it raised money for the war effort was to invite people to pin money and pledges to invest in war bonds on wooden statues of Hindenburg erected in German towns and cities.

Substantial increases in production were achieved, although organization of the war economy fell short of the level of efficiency to which it aspired. For example, in 1917 output of rifles and machine guns hugely exceeded the army's requirements but production of steel, a vital war material, fell. Profits for business were not controlled and manufacturers connected with the military regime made fortunes.

Inevitably, priority lay with meeting the immediate needs of the war effort. Conquered territories were plundered of food and raw materials. Employing the labor of conquered peoples was also seen as essential, with the German workforce depleted by the demand for soldiers. From 1914, the work of prisoners of war, chiefly Russians, was invaluable to the German war effort. The Third Supreme Commander pressed to maximize the supply of workers from conquered territories. Thousands of Poles were deported to Germany and put to work. When the policy was applied in occupied Belgium in the autumn of 1916, protests organized by trade unions and by the influential Belgian spokesman Cardinal Desire-Joseph Mercier led to the deportations being halted in 1917.

German nationalism
The Supreme Command also reflected a broader vision of the future of Europe, and Germany's place within it, articulated by German nationalists. They argued that Slavs were inherently inferior to Germans and that Germany had a historic "civilizing mission" in the east. In his influential book Mitteleuropa (Central Europe), published in 1915, the politician Friedrich Naumann envisioned Germany permanently dominating a swathe of Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Some areas were to be emptied of their existing population and colonized by German settlers; others were to be placed under puppet governments and economically exploited. This vision was endorsed by Austria's German rulers - who intended to take control of the Balkan Slavs and northern Italy - as well as by Germany itself, whose main interests lay in Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. The Hungarians would exercise control over Croatian Slavs.

Conquered territories
Attempts were made to implement aspects of the "Mitteleuropa plan". In 1914-15, for example, victories on the Eastern Front brought large areas around the Baltic under the administration of "Ober Ost" - German Supreme Command in the East - which was then headed by Hindenburg and Ludendorff. One of Ludendorff's initiatives was a program of Germanization, sending German teachers into local schools, in preparation for the future mass arrival of German colonists. General Hans von Beseler, the Governor-General of German-occupied Poland from 1915, promoted a scheme to shift two million Poles and Jews out of a broad strip of Polish territory bordering Germany and replace them with German settlers - a program that had become official German policy by March 1918. In addition the Mitteleuropa plan for the east, the long-term ambitions of Germany's military leadership included the annexation of much of Belgium and part of northern France.

The legacy
This New Order long predated the more familiary National Socialist New Order of the 1930s. Hitler tried to reconstruct a larger and more deadly version of the area controlled by Austria-Hungary and Germany by 1917-18. His Third Reich also practiced the economic exploitation and ethnic cleansing envisioned by Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

Aftermath
In 1918, Germany fulfilled some of its ambitions in the east and came close to victory on the Western Front. Revolutions and military collapse in Russia opened the way for Germany to impose the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on the Russians in March 1918. The treaty gave Germany control of nominally independent countries from Ukraine in the south to the Baltic states in the north. In May 1918, Romania was also forced to sign a treaty giving Germany ownership of its oil wells. German offensives on the Western Front in spring 1918, however, failed to achieve victory before the arrival of American troops in large numbers.